Best Locally Produced Documentary (2003)

Chiefs

Documentarian Donna Dewey is the only Denver-based filmmaker to win an Academy Award, and last year she put her heart and soul into producing a moving non-fiction film called Chiefs, which chronicles two seasons of play by a high school basketball team on Wyoming's impoverished Wind River Indian Reservation. Dewey and Wyoming-born director Daniel Junge capture the sweet hopes of these boys from the rez, as well as their troubles and traumas, in unblinking fashion. Among the new wave of films about contemporary Native American life, this take on the hoop dreams of kids may be the truest and most emotional.